Using Inner Tasks as a Wisdom Practice

Our gratitude goes to Jeanine Siler Jones for sharing these conscious tasks. You can find out more about Jeanine HERE.

Inner tasks as interrupting ‘business as usual’

Inner tasks are invitations to interrupt business as usual, to remember ourselves in all three centers. In the brief moments that might happen, we are available to truly participate more deeply in the world, in this moment, now.

Daily tasks as inner tasks:

before you do a daily task like sweeping or wiping down a counter, pause and notice how you are holding the broom or dishrag.

NOTE: We’ll continue adding many more practical examples of inner tasks. You can find them as we post them HERE. You can also share examples of inner tasks that have worked well for you, by sending a short summary or outline HERE.

Other ways of paying attention:

In addition to how you are performing a task, consider other ways to gather your attention such as listening to the sound your work makes, or deliberately varying the tempo of your work.

Other types of inner tasks can include observing your characteristic postures, gestures, and voice tone, and how these may be unconsciously maintaining a self-identity, while in some ways leaking vital energy. The point being not to judge ourselves when our attention wanders or habits present themselves, but to appreciate the moment as an opportunity to simply see, and to acknowledge with gratitude the seeing, and then come back to presence.

As you experiment, take time to really notice. As you engage the task you open the possibility to explore your reactions when making adjustments, to observe habitual patterns, and then to quietly recollect yourself to return to a more spacious kind of attention and awareness.

Finding and using doorways to presence:

We all do these automatic things, have machine-like ways of holding our bodies and enacting patterns of behavior. They help us move through life on this horizontal plane. Can we also sometimes use them as doorways into being present, expanding our attention to include more of ourselves, others and all that is around?

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